Would you run barefooted in the rain?

Magical things happen the moment you become human. You breath, you cry, you laugh, you love, you sweat, and you remain in motion. But while in motion, it’s important to periodically pause to smell the roses in the midst of experiencing the thorns of life, the heart-warming loving, the rib-cracking laughter, and the heart-breaking crying.

Life is too short. Don’t just sit around waiting for someone – anyone, especially when you know in your heart and out of experience that the person might not show up. In the same vein, because life is too short, don’t just sit around doing nothing – nothing, just laying about with all hope lost. Get up and do something – anything, so that life does not pass you by. Life, this life, is not a dress rehearsal. This is it!

Ask yourself, ‘What can make you run in the rain when thunder is booming and lightning is threatening?’ If you figure it out, just do that thing. Also, ask yourself another enduring question: ‘What makes you come alive?’ If you figure it out, just do that thing. Ghana needs people who have come alive. Whatever makes you so restless and passionate to get up and run through the rain are the things you can dare yourself to do which in your normal comfort zone, you’ll never attempt.

The driver s of life are those things that make you come alive, that fires up passion so great within you that you’re ready to do things considered a little stupid. When that thing fires you up, all you do is to get up to move and to act. It is when you’re fired up that you’re able to reach beyond yourself with a determination to dare yourself, to succeed, and to live. This principle applies to careers, education, and believing in something or someone. Life’s journey unfolds when you invest into life with energy, attention and passion.

This passing year 2010, you might have heard of people who died suddenly for unexplainable reasons and you’ve wondered – eh, why! Two days before Christmas, a five year-old boy died in his sleep after a short illness. My heart broke. You might have seen in the newspaper obituary pages deaths of people of varied ages – the young and the old. Death is no respecter of persons, and of ages. When the death bell tolls, it welcomes all. Life can get shorter than we think.

I hold this strong belief that the cemetery is filled with graves of people who did not live out their lives to the fullest. As plans were being made, as disappointments were being endured, as dreams were being suspended, as loves were being rejected, as hearts were being broken – the death bell tolled and snatched the unsuspecting. That is just the way of life – not a dress rehearsal.

This passing year, you might have made plans and nurtured good intentions which fell in thorns by the stony roadsides of life. As a result, your year did not unfold as you envisioned. You did not unravel. The year 2010 passed you by and now that it’s over, you might be wondering – ‘Where did my life go?’ So would you dare to run barefooted in the rain in 2011 in a grand cross-over effort to dare yourself to do more?

Some of us simply live on the veranda of life. These are the balcony people – easily forgotten by those at the high table in the main hall. The balcony people, those in the porches and backyards, are easily exposed to the vagaries of the weather – rain, wind and the hot tropical sunshine. Many a time, the journey from the veranda to the living room can be so tough. The escape route from the veranda to a better place might be to simply jump into the hard-hitting tropical rain, barefooted and run, hoping against hope.

Life can be likened to the familiar comfort of sitting in an old couch with the springs collapsing and the stuffing sticking out. For some of us, although that old couch gets us nowhere, yet, we remain stuck to its old comfort. But there comes a time when we must throw away the old couch and dare ourselves to try other things with a firm conviction that life is short.

Life can also be likened to an old pillow. Some pillows are so tired and stinky, harbouring the germs, the dirt and the drooling of the ages. Although familiar, they must be thrown away because of over-usage that has rendered it unhealthy, flat and hardened with the stuffiness long gone.

The old couch and old pillow hold both good and bad memories. There is safety in the familiar, yet a fully lived life must go beyond the old couch and the old pillow. For some of us, including me, abandoning old pillows and old couches might be the only way to have a jump-start on life and by that, launch successful reversals to old familiar habits and appearances of quitting on life, quitting on love, quitting on hope, and quitting on dreams.

Yes, running barefooted in the rain exposes you to the vagaries of the elements, unprotected and leaving you next to nature. You might step on a nail and the tropical rainfall would beat you mercilessly, while the thunder and lightning threaten. But at the end of it all, you can shrug off the rain water, dry yourself up, and move on to newer and probably, better things. Then, someday, because you dared to confront life, you would celebrate the rain.

The lyrics of one songster, Aaron Tippin, goes: ‘Let's love like there's no tomorrow. Live for every moment. Laugh at least a little every day. It’s impossible to say if we’ll see the sunrise in the morning.’ How so true these precepts! These lyrics present three powerful principles to live by. They are: love, laughter and living in the moment.

Living in the moment, in the now, is so difficult because some of us spend excessive amount of time dwelling on yesterday’s pains and hurts and disappointments while the present moment with its possibilities passes by, never to return. We forget that what we always have for sure is now. We’re not guaranteed the next moment, the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year, the next decade.

When you love someone, enjoy the heart journey. We’re not guaranteed life to see the sunrise or the rainfall the day after today. And laughter makes life easier because if you don’t laugh, you would cry about the downs of life. Despite the storms of life, a healthy sense of humour brightens the dark corners.

My dear reader, I wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year. As for me, myself and I, we might set out to learn to dance ‘agbadza’ in 2011! Watch out! I might break-out dancing perfect ‘agbadza’ at a location near you sometime on the journey of 2011. On your part, find something challenging, fun and extraordinary to do in 2011 – something that is definitely outside your comfort zone – because whatever makes you come alive is what will drive you to run in the rain, barefooted.

Trivialities are breaking our backs

The mass media are guilty of propagating trivialities in our national discourse. But our leadership, also known as the political elite, are guiltier of pushing trivialities into our national discourse. The followership, also known as Ghanaians, especially the category known as foot soldiers, serial callers and their cousins the social commentators, are also very guilty of giving out little-thought-out, sensational, trivial, sound-bite, chest-clearing commentaries into FM radio space.

Trivialities are unimportant, inconsequential, insignificant, frivolous, marginal, petty, slight, minor, trifling and negligible issues/things. But considering our current state of national funk and under-development, our needs and our thoughts and our focus must be top-heavy on things that are critical, very important, necessary, vital, essential, crucial, decisive, strategic, as well as urgent and of the essence.

Come along with me for an eye-popping eavesdropping session on conversations in Ghana, a country that God in His own wisdom and kindness has chosen to bless and maybe, just maybe, make great and strong. Be a fly on the wall, but don’t sit still. Periodically, shine your eyes like flies do with their ‘forearms’. Have you watched flies lately? They are fascinating. Listen in below.

Honourable Avleh: “How dare anyone give us larger than life Honourable parliamentarians grades? We would stop any journalist who tries to touch us even if he/she is from the New York Times, Financial Times, BBC, CNN or Al Jazeera. We are powerful and would stretch forth our long hands into the world to teach journalists a big lesson. If anyone touches us, we would explode to boiling point, with temper tantrums and egos flying very high. Do they know who we are?”

Eva Amponsah: “Oil will come soon. Then, all of Ghana’s problems will be solved. But have you heard the latest news? The President returned to Ghana so Dr Grace Bediako, the female statistics ‘whiz kid’, can personally count him. Wow! How nice! This country is really getting somewhere. Ghana is better. Join me to sing the Better Ghana Agenda mantra. La lala lala. See? It’s a cure-all for our ills.”

Kofi Zuzulibubu: “I say Taflatse taflatse ten times to crude oil. Let’s just go shopping with the crude oil money. Let’s spread our country’s wealth. Let’s shop until we drop. A little from China. A little from India. A little from Korea (South, that is). Sorry, we already have the STX housing ‘deal’ with Korea so we’ve already shopped out and dropped on hard floors of Korean corridors with land, access roads, bla bla bla all free of charge!”

Naa Amakey: “But this flood in the north! His Very Excellency Mills has not gone there yet. But who cares! During the former Very Excellency President Kufuor’s time, he too did not visit the north during the flood. So it’s a one-one draw! Kufuor had an accident. Rawlings had an accident too. Or, he didn’t?”

Musah Alhassan: “Our Mother the Madam should become the President of Ghana. Look at Madam Rawlings. So gorgeous! Even her head gear alone can solve all of Ghana’s problems. Our Father the Founder ruled for only nineteen and a half years. We need more. We no go sit down. We shall fight until our Mother takes over the throne.”

Nyarkoa: “Our Presidential Palace should not be called Jubilee House. Flagstaff House is better. We should make the residents of the capital city of the American state of Arizona jubilant by naming our ‘state house’ after their city. Do you know that most North American residents on the East and West Coast know next to nothing about Arizona let alone its capital city Flagstaff? So we should glorify Flagstaff.”

Kwaku Ofori: “Our two leading political parties, the NDC and NPP, are very much like the Accra Hearts of Oak and Kumasi Asante Kotoko. They are our political Hearts and Kotoko. Rivalry between them is stiff and ruthless, but fun. Eh, so when are they going to settle down to the real and urgent task of nation-building?”

Paulina Bansah: “Our big men are buying state lands left right and centre. Some of them are knuckle-headed, with stomachs like that of pregnant women, with heads as ugly as dry coconuts. When would they ever learn that Ghana belongs to all of us? Greedy Bastards! Na who born dog?”

Teacher Appa: “I’m an opinion leader of foot soldiers. It’s true that some bands of young men could on any day sweep through town to ‘seize’ public toilets and lock out a government office. But it’s a legitimate thing to do. Our party is in power. After all, the NPP people did it to us, so this is our turn. The toilets belong to us. We would show them power.”

And so goes our trivialities-charged national discourse, day in and day out. No inventive solutions are in sight for our myriad national problems. These trivial issues are bruising our sense of focus. Our distractions are too numerous to create the kind of space that can change the circumstances of our dear country. More often than not, year in and year out, one party in and one party out, it feels as if Ghana is a directionless ship that floats on a vast ocean.

Unfortunately, in the above made-up but close to real life loose train of thought from our national air space; there is not one word of science; not one sentence of technological advancement; not a cough about our sewage system; not a sneeze about solar energy considering our God-given gift of over-abundant sunshine; not an itch about poverty considering the number of our people who go to bed hungry; and not an urgent bowl movement over the fact that the number of young people who sell made-in-anywhere products by roadsides have increased.

We are fast becoming a nation of trivialities and the two leading political parties, the NDC and the largest opposition recently-ruling NPP give the appearance of being champions of trivialities.

How do we move this nation forward when we don’t seem to have focus? How does a country yank millions of its people out of desperate stinking poverty when what is constantly on its radar is talk about who is insulting whom from the vast repertoire of insults and sound-alike insults?

How does Ghana “Roll back malaria” so that none of its children die before their fifth birthdays? When do our leaders focus on the nation’s development when even those in quasi-political office desire and at times, demand to be called Honourable to their ego-filled personhood?

Arrogance is weighty. Back-breaking arrogance is crushingly painful. When impudence joins forces with arrogance, the outcome is grand haughtiness. So it is that public pronouncements from some functionaries of the NPP during their term in office, and now of some office holders of the ruling NDC render the two parties as champions of trivialities.

The current environment is intolerable – unless you turn off your radio and shut off the mass media, and completely tune off the petty ranting and tantrums of grownups.

The cautionary tale of Jenkins Scott

No condition is permanent. You may be up today but down tomorrow. Or, you may be down now wondering when it would be your turn and then one day, unexpectedly, your dim light begins to shine and you begin a joyous journey up.

Ups are sweet places; high-flying and eagle-like on strong wings, floating in the skies. But lows! Who wants the lows! But even though we don’t desire lows so zoom our prayers on the highs, there comes a time when the lows descend on us with reckless abandon. Some lows can be too low for words to describe. So when I came across the story of Jenkins Scott in the Liberian media, it got my full attention. He went from a very high-high to a very low-low.

The story of Major Jenkins Scott is such a powerful cautionary tale with layers upon layers of lessons for all. Folks who are on their lows can learn useful lessons from Jenkins Scott on how not to behave if they’re ever graced with the chance to rise above their current funky stations in life. People who are currently on their way up in society would learn to pause to smell the roses. Those who are currently on the highs in life would need to do a whole lot of pausing to reflect.

Who is Major Scott?”

He was powerful; a lawyer who became the Minister of Justice of Liberia after the People’s Redemption Council (PRC) of Samuel Doe successfully overthrew the True Whig Party in a bloody military coup d’état on 12th April, 1980. Stories about Jenkins Scott are legend and grim. Yes, he was hailed by some but many saw him as the devil incarnate – wicked, ruthless, callous and a champion of excesses of atrocities including alleged and unspeakable bloody murderous human rights abuses like mutilations.

He is also accused of being one of the central characters who planted the seeds that led to the bloody civil wars in Liberia. Jenkins Scott was Justice Minister when opposition figure, now President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was thrown into prison. Several journalists were also imprisoned without trial as ‘enemies of the state’ during the lawless and brutish Doe regime.

Scott was feared, as such people are feared. It is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A man I spoke to described Major Scott as follows; ‘Just the mention of his name brought fear.’ So the Minister of Justice had a reputation for abusing justice.

Ghanaians alive and politically conscious in the 1980’s can relate to this story of fear of leaders. At the mention of some names, at the sight of a soldier with a gun, knees wobbled and hearts palpitated; even manhood feminized. Ghanaians suffered their own atrocities in the 1980s. The West African region was heated up by adventurist soldiers who toyed away with the lives and fate of their citizenry. That was the era of Major Scott in Liberia.

But on Saturday, November 6, a reporter of one of Liberia’s leading newspapers, the New Democrat, discovered Major Scott asleep in a pile of garbage in the neighbourhood of the Temple of Justice, the magnificent building in Monrovia that houses the Supreme Court. He was hungry, thirsty and dirty. The irony is that one of the most powerful ministers of justice ended up in a pile of ‘bola’ at the justice ministry – his former empire. What a cruel joke life can play on the unsuspecting!

Photographs of Scott I’ve seen dated as recently as 2008 depict him as doing well. One of them even carries a caption quoting him as saying, ‘I want to be Liberia’s Ambassador to The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.’ The details of what happened in the two-year period from ‘I want to be Ambassador’ to I’m laying in a pile of garbage, hungry, thirsty and dirty is at best, murky and eye-popping. Probably, something mental was already simmering inside of him all along from the effects of war.

Beyond morality, beyond thoughts of ‘it serves him right’, there are lessons for a county like Ghana that has not been to war. The hard frightening fact is that a war might be waged for a short period but the spill-over of war could take generations to cure and clean up. Seven years after the two senseless civil wars, one can visibly see the scars of war in Liberia on buildings with glaring bullet holes. Some of these buildings seem to stare at you and whisper, “We were victims too! We have bullet holes to show for the merciless pounding.”

The bullet holes in some buildings have been patched. Yet, when you look closely beneath the patchwork of cement, you can still see the scars left behind. If walls made of concrete still bear witness to war, what about the scars left behind in people’s hearts and minds?

Enters the results of research:

The results of two separate studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) conducted in Liberia by Harvard University in 2008 and 2010 will make your blood freeze about the long-term effects of war. Here are two key conclusions. (1) People exposed to extreme violence suffer mental disorders later in life. (2) Liberians who were exposed to sexual violence (rape) during the war suffer more mental health disorders after the war than those who were not.

Here are some mind-numbing statistics. In the 2008 study of an adult household-based population, 40 percent of respondents were found to have symptoms of major depressive disorder, 44 percent with symptoms of PTSD, and eight percent were found to suffer from social dysfunction. Of those studied, 33 percent had served time with fighting forces. The results of the studies suggest that sexual violence impacted on both males and females during the Liberian civil wars.

One of the studies found that villages that had experienced greater suffering from the war had a higher prevalence of PTSD than villages that did not suffer much during the war. The researchers found that surprisingly, individuals who were not even combatants of the war because they were very young at the time, also showed high prevalence of PTSD.

The physical wars have ended but the psychological war endures – in the mind. War is traumatic both physically and mentally – what is known as psycho-social trauma. The 14 year civil wars spanned the period between 1989 and 1997 and 2003 to 2004. Jenkins Scott was at the centre of the violent regime. Who knows what he did? Who knows what he witnessed? Who knows what he ‘directed’ to be done and watched as they were being done? A lot must be stuck in his mushy tissue – the brain.

So key questions being asked in Liberia include: “Is Jenkins Scott crazy?” Why did he end up in a garbage pile at his former empire office?

So what for Ghana?

Speak peace to Ghana. If during the 2012 ‘Crude Oil” Elections, naughty blood-thirsty loud-mouthed low-cost individuals run their stinky mouths on radio stations beating war drums, bragging that if their political party does not win, they will burn Ghana and let the blood flow, yell into their ear drums, “Tofiakwa, NO WAR FOR GHANA!”

Thinking Hutzpah over coastal West Africa

What is a Promised Land? Who promises what to whom? Does luck have a place in a promise? Or is it just like beauty that resides only in the eyes of the beholder? When and how does one get to know for sure that something he/she has is a promise? How does one handle a promise once it has been identified as such?

What makes a piece of land, or vast stretches of it, worthy to be considered a promise? Is it the quality of the land that makes the owners think that they have been blessed? Can one get something out of nothing? Or, get nothing out of something? The land of Israel is unlike ours – dry and stony, yet it is considered a treasure. These thoughts flooded my mind while I gazed at the land from an Air Nigeria (formerly Virgin Nigeria) flight from Kotoka to Liberia’s Robertsville International Airport.

Flying over Accra on a cloudless day is too revealing. It becomes obvious beyond all reasonable doubt that our capital city has over-grown and does not make sense. Something is happening to Accra. A nameless, formless, shapeless, unrecognizable and cacophonous something is happening to the town of my birth!

Accra spills over from east to west; from north to south. It is bursting at the seams. It is as if most of the villages and towns of Ghana have packed baggage and garbage, re-located to, and congregated in Accra for a big conference that has no end date. It’s an open-to-all sort of conference so all are welcome. Accra seems to be saying to Ghana – ‘Bring me all your mansions, your shacks, your hamlets, your poor, your funk, and I’ll give thee rest.’

Apart from some pockets of well-laid out areas, the aerial view of Accra, what you see from above the ground while airborne -- is as chaotic as what you see when on land. The nature of growth of this city is crying for structure, for order, and definitely for a whole lot of planning. Where are the elders of the town of my birth?

As the Air Nigeria flight, which is fast losing its virginity, continued the journey westward over Cote d’Ivoire, the beauty of the land became striking. Vast stretches of green upon green land hit me. It spelt agriculture. It gave the impression of a ‘food basket.’ The masculinity of the lush green forest, entangled with the femininity of its softness, took my breath away and made me feel that God’s glorious hands are in this.

The knowledge that the land is not only fertile but also endowed with varied mineral resources made me smile. Large meandering rivers, brown in colour, dirtied from misuse and abuse, gorgeously snake through the land on their uneventful journey to pour it all out into the mighty Atlantic Ocean. It’s the same ocean that ferried millions of unwilling children of West Africa into dehumanizing slavery to toil to advance other people’s civilization whilst ours remains stuck in underdevelopment funk.

But then quickly, the sense of recent history dawns and the reality struck -- this is no food basket at all. This is a jungle; a jungle in which poverty hugs with thorns. A jungle in which atrocities occur! A jungle in which some of the inhabitants are stuck in hopelessness! A jungle that is gifted with so much that is yet to be explored for the benefit of the majority of its people. Still, a jungle! The regional land of my birth.

Soon, the flight began the descent into Liberia – more land with lush green forest; a country in which it rains ‘by heart’. It is as if one can plant the eye of a fish and it would germinate! But the reality hovers below the clouds -- that this country is bruised; it went through two senseless, destructive civil wars that lasted fourteen years.

Throughout the less than two hour flight, thoughts of hutzpah flooded my mind. If only hutzpah could be sprinkled from an airplane over coastal West Africa! If only everyone would swallow a little bit of hutzpah! If only I could find my own hutzpah! The thoughts of hutzpah gave me flashbacks.

About fifteen years ago during life’s journey, my deputy at work was an American woman of Jewish descent named Stephanie. One day, she said something to me that was at once disturbing, yet thought-provoking. She remarked, ‘Doris, you have everything you need to achieve greatness, with the exception of one key ingredient.’ The remark startled me. In my taken-aback mode, I asked her, ‘What do you mean?’ Her response was prompt and matter-of-factly; in just one word – ‘Hutzpah!’ I retorted, ‘W-H-A-T?

I swallowed my pride and hurt to engage in a deep but confusing conversation about ‘hutzpah’ (also spelt chutzpah or huspa). Stephanie’s grandmother was a Jewish girl who survived Hitler’s Holocaust in Poland and migrated to the USA. Over six million Jews perished at the mercilessly cruel hands of Hitler and his Nazi associates in a grand effort to wipe them out of the face of the earth. Yet, they continue to endure – and to thrive.

The story of the success of the Jews is not talked about much. Some explain it away from only a Biblical point of view – that God blessed them. But there is something I wish I could put hands on about why the Jews have been successful throughout history whilst Africa fails? Dear reader, if you have this knowledge, please share it with us. ‘Hutzpah’?

So it was that a granddaughter of a holocaust survivor (1938-1945), my assistant at work, had observed me for a little over a year and her bold verdict was that I needed hutzpah to crank up my life! She explained that there is no English word that can fully define this thing called hutzpah, a Yiddish word, and a vernacular of the Hebrew language. The closest English words are guts, courage, bravery and audacity. But the unique characteristic of hutzpah is that it is not given. It can only come from the depths of one’s own insides.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe the importance of marshalling ‘hutzpah’ to pull off challenging tasks. There are certain tasks that can be accomplished in a casual mode by putting in average effort. But it requires a lot of hutzpah to solve really challenging, stubborn and difficult tasks, and hard-crusted problems – like ours.

Hutzpah does not come easily. It can only be marshalled with resilience and a determination to think and believe ‘Yes, I can’ even when you know that you can’t. When all the evidence suggests that you can’t accomplish a certain feat, when all odds seem to go against you, that is when a still small voice lying dormant from the depth of your being, should whisper to you, ‘Yes, you can!’

As hutzpah thoughts enveloped me, I wondered when West Africa would marshal its hutzpah and yank itself out of under-development funk. But selfishly, I wondered when I would finally find my own hutzpah. Perhaps, I would find it in Liberia. And with those thoughts, I got off the plane to head toward rainy Monrovia.

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